Shawn walk’s through converting an RSLogix / MicroLogix program to a CCW / Micro800 project in today’s episode of #AutomationTechTalk Lunchtime Edition livestream: Watch Automation Tech Talk on The Automation Blog:



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Automation Tech Talk Show Notes: Thanks for listening! If you’d like to join the show sometime, don’t hesitate to use the contact us link. NOTE: There is no show planned for this Friday (9/5). Links mentioned in video:

– Migration Guide
– Conversion Tool Released
– Conversion Tool Updated
– Conversion Tool Download
– Conversion Tool How To Article
– Conversion Tool How To Video
– Shawn’s Online Courses
– Shawn’s In-Person Courses

Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated)

Shawn Tierney (Host): Hey, everybody. Welcome to Automation Tech Talk lunchtime edition. Shawn Tierney here from Insights. And today, we’re gonna take a look at something different. We’re gonna take a look at migrating a Micrologix program to a Micro 800 program, and we’re going to do this because, I had somebody ask a question about connecting to a Micro 800 from a SCADA package.

And, you know, when I did my VSC course, I did I think every Allen Bradley PLC except for the Micro 800. So I thought, you know, this would be a good time to convert my my VUSC application that I use to simulate the data for that for that course. And, anybody in my VUSC course can download that, in Micrologic, PLC five, ControlLogics, CompactLogics, multiple versions. You know, you know, I recently converted it to Siemens because I wanted to add those advanced graphical lessons to my unified comfort panel and unified, a basic panel course. So I need to convert it to Siemens, and then somebody asked me to test their SCADA package with Codesys.

And as you know, I had a couple of vendors step up and send me Codesys PLCs. So I converted well, not all of it. There’s five molding lines. I wanted to do something different than a bottling line or, you know, a a widget maker. And so, I only did one molding line into the into the code Sys because, you know, I I I we all we’ve talked about that before.

But in any case, needs a little love and tender love and care to the code sys, IDE does. But in any case, yes. I figured, hey. Let’s use this to convert my existing program, which I which I wrote from scratch to the micro 800, and let’s see how it goes. Now I did this this morning around 04:30.

I went through it once, and it seemed to work okay. So I figured, we would do this during lunchtime. And so if you guys have any questions on this or anything, let me know. Oh, a couple of housekeeping things. There will be no episode of the show tomorrow.

I’m kinda backed up trying to get through a couple of videos that I’m, sponsored videos with vendors. And, also, I have to, just get all the stuff to do with the the automation school, but I do I did record this morning an update for any students at the automation school. So that I’m gonna schedule that to go out this afternoon because I said September 4 in it. Now looking backwards, I probably should have said September 5. But in any case, that’ll come out this afternoon, and I kinda update a lot of the new lessons over at the automation school.

So, especially customers and PLC courses, PAC courses over there, you wanna check that out. I did have a great conversation with a gentleman who was who knew what a Symax 300 was, so we’ll try to get him on the automation museum podcast, which is I’m calling the history of automation. I have we’ve recorded three already. History of Triconics, history of Wonderware, history of, Rocco PLCs. And these are all from people’s perspectives.

This is, like, the definitive history, but, you know, it was been a lot of fun hanging out with these people who work with this old stuff, and, I really have enjoyed it. Sunday, my goal is to edit those three and, and, start scheduling them to release. They’ll they’ll come out on the on the regular channels I have now because we haven’t even funded the Automation Museum yet. So if you have a an extra dollar or 2 this month, please consider going to automationmuseum.org and making a donation. I wanna thank everybody who has already donated.

Last time I checked, it’s been a few weeks, but, we were, like, 7% of our goals. So, I mean, we’re we’re you know, there’s no rush on this. The old stuff’s not going anywhere. So, and I have a lot of people asking if they can send stuff in. I’m asking them to hold on to it into their in their attics for right now, because I just I don’t and when when when they when when you get taxed as a business, they wanna tax everything that’s in in your business.

Right? And so it’s hard to explain to them that this is stuff that’s for a future museum. So to avoid getting taxed on stuff that I don’t use for my business, I’m asking people to hold on to it. Now if you absolutely have to get rid of it, I do have room in my attic at home, and, I’ll stick it up there for the meantime. But in any case, you can imagine I hate their that stuff all the way up and then bring it back down later.

So in any case, with that said, I do appreciate everybody who sent stuff in. And now I’m gonna try something new. I wasn’t happy with the the the way StreamYard, which is a software I use to livestream. I wasn’t happy with the way they were doing the graphics. So I’m trying to put a little bit different today.

And so I’m gonna switch over, and try it this way. I hope this is better resolution for you. I don’t have as much control when I use StreamYard natively. Like, I can’t crop myself out instead of having the whole studio here, but I’m hoping the graphics are better for you. So here’s an example.

And I wrote this program. I wanted it to be something that my VUEs students could understand. I don’t wanna make, like, some new algorithm that was, like, gonna win a Nobel Peace a Nobel Prize or anything like that. But in any case, I don’t know if it would be a peace prize, but some other prize. But in any case so it’s a very simple program.

Basically, I have a bunch of JSRs in the main routine. So many people are used to that. I figured I would just go with that. And, because, this had to run on a Michelogix 1,000, I put all the simulation in one ladder program. Now this is the 1,400 version.

I didn’t change it. I just you know, I did it all in the 1,000, tried to cram everything in there. Actually, could not fit everything into the 1,000, but I came close. So in any case, that’s why you’ll see the, the the lead numbering here of the of the files. And, I did separate the molding machines here because, you know, you only have 15.

You know, I think it’s, fifteen and sixteen is your debug. So, that’s why I did it that way. So if you’re asking, hey, Shawn, why’d you do it that way? That’s why I did it that way. So this is a program we’re gonna convert to Micrologix.

And to do this, I’m gonna first do a file save as, and I’m gonna save it as a SLC, a library file. Okay? Even though it’s even though it’s a 1,400, we’re saving as an SLC. It doesn’t mean slick 500. It means library file.

At at one point, it probably meant slick 500 library container or something, but in any case now I have found that if you have the free software. Right? So if you have the RS Logix micro starter light, I found that that option is not in there. So you may wanna reach out to your local Rockwell rep, and usually, they have a real nice guy named the PLC specialist. That’s a job I did for twenty five years, and they’ll do that for you.

Look at it just takes some you know, it’s so, I mean, we’re talking seconds. Right? So in any case, usually, that’s something I would do for my old customers, you know, over morning coffee. So in any case, I’m gonna save this. I have a folder, my VSC basics folder.

I downloaded all the files just a few minutes ago, and, I’m going to go ahead and export with comments, and I’m just gonna leave all the defaults there, and voila, it’s all been exported. Okay? So now we’re ready to switch over to CCW. And in CCW, this utility used to be able to be downloaded separately. A matter of fact, I put all the links because I have covered this quite a bit.

I put all the links in the description so you can see all the different links to all the articles and videos I’ve done on this in the past. But now in the mic in connect components workbench, I’m gonna go to tools, micro MicroLogix to micro 800 converter. Okay? And so and if you guys can’t hear me or you can’t see me, let me know in the chat. But any case, that brings up this little guy here.

This is version five point o five. I’m in CCW version 22. It just happened to be what was installed. Okay? So in any case, let’s go ahead and choose the MicroLogix file.

I put it into my I think it’s in documents, VSC basics. Boom. I have this checkbox checked because the files match. K. Those the the files have the same name.

I’m gonna go to well, I happen to have here the I think I have the L24QBB. Yeah. That’s what it looks like. Yeah. So that’s what I’m gonna use there just because that’s what I have on the workbench.

And we’re gonna do, okay. And I wanna thank everybody for tuning in. Guys, if you have suggestions on what you would like to see for future episodes, please contact me, throw them in the chat. Also, if you wanna come on the show and share a trick that you learned, I’d love to have you on the show. This is, my new lunchtime thing that I do to learn.

You know, why browse the web and, you know, read the bad news? But I can share tips with the with you folks. And this is something I was doing anyway, so I had to do it for my I wanted to add those lessons to my VSC course. So figured, why not do this with the, with the audience as well? And so one of the things you’re gonna notice now there is a really good go back to full screen here.

Did it go back to full screen? You know what? I think that’s the other thing is too. With this, you have to select the browser. So one of the things that you’ll find the links in the description is that Rockwell has a phenomenal phenomenally phenomenally well documented guide to doing this.

So I’d super appreciate as I was reading through it, and it’s they’ve done a great job. They updated it over time, and it really does a great job explaining what the differences are. So if you do take on a project to do this, whether it’s internal or for somebody else, get that guide. Read it the cover to cover. It is excellent.

And, I just really appreciate when a vendor puts that much effort into it. You know, I I I talked about other vendors where I was looking up trying to look up just how a single instruction worked, and it was so frustrating. But when you’re working with people like Rockwell and Siemens and other big companies, they just have great documentation, and it’s it’s hard not to have that. Right? You want that good documentation.

But, they have great documentation on this process, and you can see it came in, but we got a lot of errors. Now I wanna look at these errors, and I don’t know why go to the stop page. How do I see my errors, people? Why is it hiding behind? I’m just gonna open up the main program, see if we can get the error list to be on top.

There we go. Okay. Great. So and I know a lot of you may be listening while you’re driving, so I’ll try to go through these. So first of all, no status file.

Right? There’s no status file in the, like, gray 100. Now there is a first pass bit. So we’ve talked about this a lot lately, and so we don’t have to worry about that. It’s it’s in there.

Like, they used to say what was it? Prego? It’s in there. So in any case, we don’t have to worry about that. But there is no, like, status file.

So one of the things I would use in the Micrologix and, really, all the PLCs is that free running clock, to to flash different lights on and off. And so, because I encapsulated in this program the program out of my PLC basics course. It’s a subroutine. And so, typically, we don’t use it because we’re and but I wanted to put it in there. So if somebody wanted to go in and, and and create a screen and view for their for the PAC basics or POC basics, they’d have it.

But in any case, it also talks about arithmetic status bits are not supported in the 800 as well. You can, like, have a math overflow or something like that. So you’re gonna be cognizant of that. And then this is revised usage of the timer accumulate value. Now it talks about this thing called an RA ton, MicroLogic’s, user defined function block.

And so I wanna get into this. Let’s take a break here, and let’s look at what happened here. So first thing is we have a main program. There is not really a subroutine with the micro 800. It’s you just have all these programs.

Think of think of, ControlLogix and just having a bunch of routines that all run at the same time or a bunch of programs that each have one routine in them. Okay? And that’s all they have in them. So yeah. So there’s not a exact this to that, but in ControlLogix, let’s say you had you could only create programs, and every program has a single routine, and every program would always run.

That’s what you have with the POUs, program organizational units inside of, inside of, the CCW and the micro 800. And, you know, I think if you had let’s say you had, Siemens and you had a bunch of OBs, and they were all scheduled to run continuous. So OB1, then OB2, then OB3, and then OB4. I know you can’t some of those numbers you can’t use, but you guys get the point. Right?

So that’s what a POU is. All the POUs run. All the POUs run. I think, you can change your order by reordering them, but they all run, and each POU is really a language. So you can have a POU that’s a think of a POU.

It’s like a program and a routine together. Anyways, with all that said, you can see the main POU. This is my jump to subroutines, except instead of jumping the subroutines, it’s jumping to user defined functions. So this is very similar to, like, a function block in Siemens. Right?

And I I guess you would call it in logic, say, they, you know, you kinda look at it as a as a a subroutine, right, as a routine that you have to jump to, a routine other than the main, but it’s not in that group. It’s in this other list. Okay? And so you can see that looks that looks like my original code except for one big difference. Okay?

Is that some of the timers like, I don’t have my tons, didn’t come over as tons. And when I was doing, factor IO, when I was doing the quest for, you know, Micrologix, Micro 800, and ControlLogix, it was like, hey. Some of these instructions operate differently. Coners, timers, slight little differences. Well, I addressed that by just changing the way I wrote the program for a factor I o.

But here, if you’re if you have an existing plant, you don’t wanna have to figure that out. So what Rockwell does here is they give you all they create all these user defined function blocks. They have a countdown function block. They have a copy, a counter function block. Right?

This one’s a structured text. So, very simple. They just do that that line of text. Right? Just checking over there, make sure you guys can see this.

So here’s one that’s called the count up CTU. Now there is a CTU inside of the, micro 800. I wouldn’t have wrote all this code to to to make it work, but they wanted to operate identically to the way it was in the Micrologix. And so here you go. And so you can see all the code.

It took several lines of code, eight lines of code to replace to make the CTU in the mic in the microHunter act like the like the one in the, MicroLogix. In any case but some of these, like the LEM instruction, this is like you can just look at this and say, okay. Yeah. They they did exactly what we’re looking for. But when it comes to, like, the one shot, it’s kinda like, nothing.

It’s like, yeah. Maybe you should not use the ONS. Maybe you should use the OSR. And there was another one too it didn’t do. Oh, sequencer.

The sequencer is just like, yeah. We don’t have one, so make your own code up. So in any case, there’s two of those in there. Out of all these instructions it created for me to to to mirror what was in the micro 800. What was to mirror, actually, what was in the Micrologix inside of the micro 800.

You know, it created all those, those new instructions for me. So let’s go back to the error list because there’s a couple of very other interesting things you guys would probably wanna know about. First of all, the only symbols that can convert it to aliases, sadly, are for the inputs and outputs. So all my inputs in slot zero went to the input, the underscore I, underscore I o, embedded I o, and same thing with the outputs. But those are the only ones who got the symbols brought over.

I had symbols on timers, presets, and counters, and I had a lot of symbols in there. None of those came in. It’s very sad. And, we can see here the warning about the time of the accumulate value. So, you know, some of the changes there, the status files, these are the two flashing bits I would have to replace, which is not a problem.

I get all the bits I can use in the program. You see a lot of information about the timing timer accumulate value, how how it operates differently. Here’s the two, the ONS and the SQL that didn’t work. And then, the every place that did find the s one fifteen bit, it did convert it over to the first scan bit. That’s good.

Right? That was really good. There was also, in the one I did this morning, there was also some truncating of my descriptors. Okay? So with the descriptors, you know, they’re limited to 255 characters.

And so I don’t know why this one was different. Maybe I already truncated it, but, with the, with the descriptors, if you had a lot of descriptions, comments and and whatnot, they would get truncated. And not a big deal, but, you know, you gotta be aware of that. The good thing is they totally document, you know, in the that file. We were looking at that conversion file.

In there, they tell you everything that doesn’t convert over. So I know at home this morning, I know that, all of the all of the, comments and descriptions that get truncated, it’s totally documented. That’s a CSV file that gets saved to your hard drive. And so you know everything you have to go and fix. But, I just thought it was very interesting how to address the slight nuances between the counters and the timers and whatnot that they create all these at, like, what you would think of as an add on instruction in Studio 5,000.

They create them as, user defined function blocks inside of CCW. And, apparently, if it’s not on that list, if there’s an error not an error in that list, then you’re gonna expect the same type of operation, but you’ll also see that they warn you that you do have to test it. You cannot assume that everything translated perfectly. Right? And some things you gotta know is, like, what is the, what is the speed of the controller?

You’re gonna assume that the micro eight hundred’s faster. Does that cause any issues? You also have to understand about, like, what’s the response time of the IO. Right? So in 90% of the applications, that may not be a big deal.

But in some applications, you know, you may start seeing multiple counts where you only saw one, you know, multiple posts where you only saw one. You may have current limitations on the new inputs and outputs versus the old ones. So a lot of things you had to do to do one of those conversions. I think the first thing you would typically do is, you know, get the and they actually have this in IAB. It’ll convert from one to the other, and that manual I mentioned has even the wiring diagrams from one to the other.

Just they just did a phenomenal job. So that’s what I’m working on here. I wanted to share that with you. It’s actually pretty user friendly, but, again, don’t discount the amount of time you’re gonna have to do to test the converted code. Same goes when we talked about converting PLC five or six five hundred to ControlLogix, CompactLogix, or soft PLC.

You always have to test out the code because, these people make these importers and exporters. They don’t they don’t know everything. Right? They’re not perfect. I will say this, though.

Doing what we just did was so much easier than manually retyping everything into Siemens and the Codesys. So, yes. Would I do this and then go and debug it? Yeah. I’d much rather do that than have to manually reenter all the code.

That was a real drag. I’m glad it’s done, but it was a real drag. So tools like this, yes, definitely. I know some people like, no. I’m gonna do it.

Everything bit by bit. I’m like, well, go for it. Have fun. But, I would rather use something like this. And so any case, it looks like, we’re running over twenty minutes.

So I wanna thank everybody who joined us today. Again, if there’s something you would like to see on a future lunchtime show, let me know. I usually when I’m drinking my coffee first thing in the morning, I’ll go over things and try things potentially to do at lunchtime and, be happy to share anything I can with you guys. I do wanna show now that I I I still have to refine this and get it working. Once I do, I will be adding those lessons to, both my migrate hunter course on how to do this and my VSC course on how to connect to it.

And I probably end up connected to it two different ways through LinX Classic and LinX Enterprise. But, I’m I still I didn’t get that far this morning. But in any case, there will be a what’s new in school this afternoon. There will be no episode of the lunchtime show tomorrow. Don’t know if there’ll be one Monday, so that’s we’ll play that one by year.

Just depends on how much work I have left over tonight that I don’t get through this weekend. But with that, I just wanna thank you all again for tuning in. I wanna wish you all good health and happiness. And until next time, my friends, peace.

If you have any questions about Shawn’s in-person or online courses, please don’t hesitate to setup a time to meet with Shawn via MSTeams, or drop him an email using his contact form here: https://theautomationschool.com/question/

Until next time, Peace ✌️ 

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Shawn M Tierney
Technology Enthusiast & Content Creator

Eliminate commercials and gain access to my weekly full length hands-on, news, and Q&A sessions by becoming a member at The Automation Blog or on YouTube. You'll also find all of my affordable PLC, HMI, and SCADA courses at TheAutomationSchool.com.